Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

Every morning he appeared with a box lid for a tray set forth in fresh green jungle leaves and on it a species of muffin that he had developed or the boiled green platanos that took the place of bread, a tin can of jam, or some turtle eggs if we had been lucky in a trade with some passing batalon of Leccos. Coffee he served with a flourish and from his camp fire below the bank on which our tent was pitched he would bring up a bucket of hot water with which he could keep a continual service of clean camp plates.

In the intervals at meals he stood back and fanned off the wild bees that flocked to the jam and condensed milk tins. Two little holes pricked in the milk tins guarded them, but with the jam it was different; often a half tin of jam had to be thrown away, the contents solid with reckless, greedy bee suicides. They would light on the jam while it was on the way to your lips or stow away on the under side of the jammed muffin, compelling the utmost vigilance on the penalty of a diet of raw bees. With all the reckless handling they received, not one of them stung.

It was the ant that was the irritable, hot-weaponed party who went out a-jousting from the sheer lust of battle. They were infinite in variety from the sluggish white-ant that left the table a hollow shell of sawdust on up to the leaf-cutters and army ants to whom nothing was so precious as the straight line in which they were going. But the worst, the most vicious and accursed was the large black variety one of whom made a murderous attack upon me in the darkness.

He is nearly an inch in length. To the Leccos he is known as buno-isti and they also assert that he lives in very small communities in holes in the ground, not building the ordinary nests. Agamemnon had been stung and had promptly, darkey fashion, tied a rag around his head and stayed in his tent all night groaning. A Cholo boy was stung and he too tied a rag around his head and groaned throughout the night. It seemed absurd for a mere sting to have that effect and I looked upon them with a proper scorn. I have been stung by hornets and scorpions and the latter seemed to me, at the time, as the ultimate of all stinging sensations. I was wrong.

For some reason these buno-istis seemed to have a love for passing themselves in review up the guy rope, along the ridge pole, and down the other guy rope of the tent. By observing I noticed that no sooner did the buno-isti reach the bottom of the guy rope than he started back to the front guy and began another tour. One evening I stepped out in the darkness, my foot caught on a root and I stumbled; I clutched for the guy rope to save myself and the instant my hand touched the forefinger connected with a high voltage current that gave all the sensations of a red-hot sausage grinder. I had caught a buno-isti on his way up the guy rope.

A delayed lantern revealed a crippled buno-isti and a finger with an almost invisible sting on the first joint. There was no swelling nor did any follow at any time. Yet the pain was intense; I could feel it spreading from the finger to the hand and then, slowly with an acute torture that brought no relieving numbness up to the shoulder. There it halted. But for hours, as the camp watch showed, there was no sleep possible, not until the exhaustion from pain paved the way. For three days the effects lingered in the form of a bruised sensitiveness that made that arm all but useless. A scorpion sting is a gentle tickle compared with the buno-isti.

Slowly the camp grew. A patch of jungle was cleared on the high bank above the river beyond the reach of any sudden freshet. In the early days of the camp one of these freshets descended from the Andean foot-hills and before the last of the outfit had been carried to the high bank the Cholos were struggling in a current up to their belts or portaging by the aid of poles held out to steady them. Where the first hasty camp had been was a torrent of muddy waters and a tiny island cut off from us by a creek torn in the bank by the flooding river. The water rose five inches a minute for about eight feet and then slowly went back during the night a few inches.

For something like eleven miles down this river there was placer gold. Wherever a sand-bar or a sand bank showed it was of black, gold-bearing sand. Anywhere you washed you got a trace or color in the pan and sometimes thirty or forty bright flecks of gold glittering against the rusty iron bottom. But with that current, the uncertain rise of freshets, the distance from civilization and main supplies, only an Indian could wash out dirt and make a living at it. The plan was to prospect the placer area extensively and establish a basis for the permanent working camp that was to follow. The gold was there, but how deep to bed rock or hard pan, whether it were best to work by dredge or shaft or open workings, these were the questions that had arisen back in the world of civilization and were solved on the basis of the results of this first camp.

From the bank at the water’s edge there stretched back a mass of matted jungle, creepers, vines, and underbrush and above, a mass of vines that tangled the treetops in great patches of aerial islands. Paths had to be cut, some kind of a working map made, the natural difficulties and conditions set forth, and the beginnings of the permanent camp put in form.

The eighteen men were swallowed up in the jungle. The clearing was scarcely made and burned before the jungle was again closing in and rising from the ground like sown dragon’s teeth. And slowly progress was made and up and down the river the camp became known and voyaging rubber traders and crews stopped as at a port of call.